


The Breakdown of a Symphony

by trailingviolets



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Love Never Dies - Lloyd Webber, Phantom - Susan Kay, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Childhood Memories, F/M, Loneliness, M/M, Mistakes, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 14:27:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trailingviolets/pseuds/trailingviolets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik and Christine become more than strangers to each other, and the Phantom of the Opera takes a leap of faith involving a mutual unmasking. Secrets surface above and below ground in subsequent chapters as the story of the mysterious composer comes to light. Christine is bold; Erik is a dreamer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Octaves

In the darkness of his milky grey-gold eyes she was assured of two instances alone; there would be a time of bittersweet unravelling between them, and there would be the scene of his confrontation with Raoul.

The ones who missed her from the upstairs light knew his nature and tricks, they soon enough were coming to punish the shadow keeping her enthralled.

Yet Erik held her in his underground home as held her gaze, boiling over with desire and wonder and the heated passion of composition over midnight shared glances. Long had he sung her to sleep, this man, long a stranger to her eyes. He thought she couldn't bear to look.

"Do you fear me?" Erik stood across the room, a hovering ghost poised still over his desk, where sheets of the empty grand staff lay scattered and torn.

"I fear what I do not known of you, Angel. I haven't even seen your face!" her voice crept up at the last with a brittle cheer, as she desperately grasped to amend the dark look suddenly present in his expressive stare. "Not that it matters so wholly to me as your music. But for my childhood, an angel, and now, a man. It is strange I suppose, yet so beautiful."

He smirked to hide his inner quarrel. "You think me beautiful?"

"Yes, Angel. Though I know that it is foreign to you."

"There are reasons, Christine, I promise. You will grow to fear me as I've grown to fear myself."

"What a statement from a teacher and an artist! You certainly lack your own faith. Tell me, do you have a name?"

Erik cleared his throat and moved closer to her over the black tiles, instantly urgent. "Why do you wish to know? Who do you inform of your horrid guide?"

Christine detected the edge to his tone, and ignored it from a practiced lifetime of his mighty admonishments. "I wish to understand, Angel. Why else would I ask to come here?"

"I'll never know why you were so eagerly drawn down to life in pitiful misery with me, Christine; my questions come to my lips out of habit. Forgive me, please?" His outstretched fingers gripped the back of her chair with whitest knuckles, his exposed eyes unreadable. The passion from their earlier duet had fled. Christine abruptly stood, startling Erik into the moment, and whirled swiftly on her heels, ever the dancer.

"Tell me your Christian name, at least, Angel?" She grasped a fold of his cloak in endearment.

"Erik; it was Erik in my past." Christine's mind reeled. Should she sing as she longed to, this name of his? Was it the right thing?  
Would it irk him to hear her voice so soon again, then cracked and straining to please? She could not hide as he cloaked himself from her.

"Erik..." she paused mid-tone at his intake of breath, the warmth between them increasing, "You'll always be there, singing songs in my head, the Angel of Music whose name I possess..." It was her voice that drew the Phantom out of the shadows, always, and Christine silently grasped to keep him near her world, if only for a few moments of their time together.

"Do you even dare to sing or try to speak to me? Wandering child, so lost, so lonely, yearning for true beauty..." a distant melody of another time came over her, and Christine continued,"To me you're beautiful, so very beautiful...everything's just as I dreamed..." His eyes still rested resolutely at her feet, likely taking in the scars and deformities there from posing en pointe over the years, often for hours. She paused to let him gawk a while; she wanted him to know that nothing was perfect, and certainly she herself was riddled with imperfections.

Christine began again with words. "An octave comprises eight notes, the last repeating the first. Just like that I am right back here with you, as on the night we first met in my crowded dorm. Look at me, Angel, as you did so fully then!" In a fitful, cloying passion she pulled his chin up, locking their eyes together, so much a child, before such a whole man. He hesitated a beat before he spoke.

"There's nothing about you that is not precious, Christine, my fear of wounding you is odious to me. That night was the deepest drink I had ever taken out of being loved by someone. I couldn't help deceiving you, and for that I am sorry. Now I know it was wrong to explore the fields of your father's compositions with my music while you were still grieving..."

"-And I may never stop grieving. I regret now giving so totally of myself mistakenly. It came to my knowledge over the years that you believed I saw you as my father, not as my living teacher, and I encouraged that idea for too long. I so dearly loved your violin sonatas, I was afraid you would never play for me again..."

"I am barely living, Christine, I-"

"Your pulse is living under my touch this second!" Her hand tilting his jaw spread over his unmasked cheek, exploratory, tentative. He trembled and shakily adjusted the folds of her dress better around her waist, careful not to directly touch her skin.

"Say my name, please? Just once more?"

"Oh, Erik, you shall have your name a thousand times if you only command it."

He appeared close to tears and quite lost inside. "I've waited twenty seven years to hear it from a friendly voice, but from yours..."

Christine's heart soared at the admission of his youth; they may yet have many years together as teacher and student. She stepped closer to accommodate his hovering hand near her waist, and laughed a bit, trying to tread gently on his brow with her fingertips. "My voice is certainly quite friendly to yours! How I missed you in my ear. Often at rehearsals I listen back to Piangi's verse and fantasize it's you, like a schoolgirl..." His expression passed over troubled, and Christine started. "I didn't mean to make light of your pain, only my own silliness. Raoul's childish habits should perhaps stay in Raoul's relationship."

"I shall come for you in your daydreams, I swear, and sing in Piangi's place. But what of your boy? Does he claim you as his own yet, Christine?" A trace of hurt, the Phantom's handsome features tense under her palm, after such divinity between them.

"He tried, my Angel. I told him that night on the freezing rooftop of your Opera that I wished only to be his friend, but he persists. I don't want to lose him, and yet, I am already taken up by thoughts of another..." she blushed a deep bruised color, "and I would make a very poor wife indeed, regardless."

"How do you deem yourself taken by another? Is there a man I do not know of waiting for your assent?" He sounded distraught, distanced.

"Look with your heart, Erik..." She placed a hand over his on her nightdress. His eyes shot down, then straight up to hers, wide with the fire of knowing, finally, after all her efforts.

"You cannot mean it, Christine, you are too much under my influence."

"And an intoxicating influence it is!" He searched his mind for reasons to evade her drifting fingers, inching closer to the place where the mask met his malformed lips. She had suspected since the first, how she had imagined so many different uglinesses, over the years, until it melted away into a clear picture in her mind.

"There's the matter we have both skirted until now that will make you disgrace me, you will spit on me and lock me away as an animal..."

"If that is your past, Erik, then let me show you another way in which people behave. I cannot imagine what you have suffered, my Angel of Music..." She massaged his clammy hand under hers, working over the palest cream of his wrists, kneading back and forth fondly. He moved to turn from her, trying to hide the faltering, bloated side of his mouth, trying to hide the loneliness and strangled whimpers she had heard when they slept room to room, since her womanhood arrived.

Christine reminisced her sixteenth birthday, walking through her suite for the first time, lying in the folded wings of her shell bed, thinking that she was at home there, among Erik's possessions and lingering, unmistakable scent. How long a journey it proved to convince him to spirit her away on overnight visits, and how short a journey it proved then to realize her hopeless love.

"Things I would never subject you to talk of, Christine. It is over; no one will ever see my face again."

"But I! It is my wish in coming to your home."

His touch chilled without warning. "You came here to unmask me, then run back through the tunnels with your story?"

"I was speaking honestly when I said I wanted to understand. Madame Giry refused to explain the scars on your wrists to me, though she told me of a boy who came once to the Opera in great pain and fear, whose face obscured the beauty underneath."

"Did she tell you of his birth, how his mother regretted neglecting to suffocate him in her haze, how she sold him as a slave in a sideshow and how they burned him, Christine, burned his wrists beyond healing, though he was a smart boy and only ever obeyed his master's command-"

"Erik, please no!"

"You know now why I hide my past from you?" Christine traced the line of his face, beyond curiosity and consumed with desire for her teacher. She barely could control herself and felt her youth just then like a stab where his hand touched her.

"I'll never know why you hide from me, but I am beginning to understand, as I had hoped." She dropped her voice down as if in reverence. "I won't move it from your face without your permission, Erik, though I wish it."

There was a pause in their quick breaths comprised of dead silence and his mind's furious peddling. Presently he sighed, all resignation, all fallen grace and strong fondness. He gently removed his hand from her body. "Better it happens now than at an inopportune moment for the both of us. I am still tied to reason enough to send you back into your world of light once and for all."

"If you say such things as justification I cannot proceed." He started to tremble again, and it was a steely voice that spoke then to her, the Phantom of the Opera in all his state.

"You have my whole permission, Christine."

Christine shakily exhaled, placing a hand on either side of the plaster cast. Whispering an inaudible Swedish prayer, and in her excitement placing a brief kiss on the fair side of Erik's jaw, Christine stepped impossibly closer. Erik's mask and wig disappeared into her grasp, falling shortly to the floor in her emotion.  
The Opera Ghost and the chorus girl stared at each other anew.

~~~


	2. Signatures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the bedroom with the owners of the Opera, Christine's reaction to Erik's face, and emotional tears. Oh my!

"It is not a terrible problem to have, the scandal of a full house." They were sitting in their canopy, reading different volumes of the same English detective series. It had lately become infamous for certain suggestive undertones; confirmed bachelors everywhere on the Continent had latched on tightly.

"But where in the world is the girl soprano?" Firmin shifted around to face his business partner by the crook of one arm.

"More accurately where under the world, my friend." Andre raised his eyebrows with meaning, and Firmin's horrified eyes asked him silently if it could really be true.

"Do you really think our Phantom kidnapped her?"

"I wouldn't expect any less of a supposed monster and a murderer."

"He hasn't harmed anyone yet."

"Not yet, dear, but I have foreseen a morbid possibility of the future some time ago, and if it is right the girl will cause much suffering." Firmin sighed, extending his hand to stroke Andre's delicate mustache.

"Why can't she just love him and let us be done with the whole matter? Drat the Vicomte and drat her pride."

"But, that's the key to our troubles-what if she does accept him, beast that he is?"

"Are we to let her rot down there, a helpless girl, even in duty?"

"If she denies him and refutes him he will send her back up to our world, I am sure."

"So you're saying we wait while she is in danger?"

"If he truly loves her as he professes, she is in no danger at all." Andre closed his other arm around Firmin's chest, leaning against him, savoring the rise and fall of his breath between the folds of their silk sheets. Never had he imagined such a life for them, here in the city. "Love is powerful, it does the work that punishment cannot."

"Love has changed the dreams of many," Firmin smiled down at his partner in indulgence, contented for the moment with his own brand of romantic wisdom. "So every hope and every prayer rests on Christine now?"

"Yes, and we cannot know what is in her future until she sees his face, and judges for herself whether she is willing."

"You have great ease in this."

"I know that we will come out unharmed no matter what, my dear."

The candle fell down to a feeble glow, and Andre entwined his legs around Firmin's lithe body, holding him to his hips like an anchor. Grinning, he leaned down to bestow a kiss upon his partner in the strange business of the Opera. It was a tender display of trust between them, witnessed only by the enclosing darkness.

~~~

Erik held his baited breath, hearing the mask shatter upon the floor and realizing vaguely that he could no longer retreat back into hiding, as he had many times in similar situations. Yet, it was with Christine that he first gave consent, revealing himself in a foolish gesture of faith, of ill-timed decisiveness. Now, the screaming and the accusations; Christine would flee to the light and think on him with revulsion, hatred, despair...lost forever to her boy of the glittering mansion between the gardens and the ancient Tuileries palace of Victorian Paris...a city that held beauty so near to worth, and him so far from human...

"Angel..." Christine whispered, "This is the obstacle that poisons my joy?"

"Yes."

"Erik, look at me." She stepped back and he surveyed her, hair tangled about in ringlets, the hem of her nightdress sodden, ethereally new and pure, a woman who would travel all her life, who would bear the glad burden of many children and sing as she worked. "Erik, I am yours."

It was not possible for a woman such as her to love him as she claimed, even as she came forward and smiled so genuinely, in her eyes the beginnings of hope.  
As Christine reached for him Erik flew to cover his deformity, full of poisonous words and painful disappointment.

"You lie!" he shrieked at her, feeling the familiar prick of tears,"You bring my demise closer with your false words, you will draw me out and spirit me upstairs to be locked away and tortured, to be a caged beast once more! I may be unworthy of life, Christine Daae, but it is the world that is hideous!" He collapsed in a fit of ineffectual rage, his wounded sobbing resounding around the open space. Erik lowered his face to his knees, trying to cover it against her gaze. She shouldn't be subjected to it, not her nor anyone else. There was a sinister silence for a moment, filled only with his pitiful whimpering. "Leave me, please."

"Beautiful creature of darkness," he could not reconcile the tenderness in her voice as it played to the acoustics of his lair, echoing off the sculpted stalactites above,"what black despair haunts you now? Erik, allow me to show you, you are not alone..."

Christine dropped swiftly to her knees and brushed the broken plaster of the mask aside, throwing his wig across the rug in blind haste. He began to edge away, fearful of the coming retribution for deceiving her, for daring to love her so fully in his lyrics, in his home. He braced for a physical admonishment on his sore deformity, as she inched herself feverishly to his side. His eyes snapped closed, shutting her out...

~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Music Theory is kicking my ass, hence the less than stellar musical references. I am most certainly not visited by an Angel of Music. Possibly the angel of slovenly tempo, maybe the angel of handing my bank account over to Jupiter and Bartalli? No, I've got it, the angel of switching from bass to treble clef in notation software every ten seconds.  
> I'm done now.  
> As always, advice is nice!


	3. Measures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik tries to compensate for his faults. Christine tries to show him his strength.

Erik felt Christine's lithe fingers smoothing out the creased skin of his deformed cheek, disappointed to be so right in his estimation, hurt to be hurt again, over the velvet of her assurances, over their shared duets and daydreams. He longed to watch the sun come up over their scene, giving him space to let go of her, in the morning light of what he was. A monster, a beast, unworthy... He remembered the words, rushing back like scavenging birds.

"Angel," she murmured, "A hundred times, I am yours." She was leaning over him then, a warm arm wrapped around his back, sliding loosely, anchoring their seated dance. As soon as he realized, she had pulled away from him to look further into his eyes, searching. It was a momentarily lapse on Erik's part, an unthinking gesture, though he understood clearly his place...

"Forgive me but I must." He turned to embrace Christine into the folds of their second kiss, Carlotta's stage gloss smeared with the determination of his bloated lips to please her.

Inside Christine's mouth he felt the muscle of articulation, the muscle of her lavish tongue, so terrible a love in her intimate lapping strokes and so beautiful; instantly he imagined the fields surrounding Paris at dawn, his quiet childhood were he handsome as any man. Wandering in the garden, reading, playing compositions, head thrown back in laughter, her hair thrown back as she gravitated towards him through the crunching fallen leaves.

She pictured the place where he grew as a boy, the place where she first found Erik's shy dreams. It was not just any man Christine wished to share her bath with, candles lit all around in a dense steam, afterwards entwining in the bedroom, chest to chest, flush and beating, pulse to pulse; it was Erik himself and all that entailed. She longed to take him back to those days as he took possession of her, to remake the singsong future, to awaken in her teacher aching discontent when they parted.

Erik pulled away from her reluctantly, his hands at her sides as she hung over him, trailing silk and crepe and the long dark ringlets of her loose hair. "I'll bring you nothing but woe."

She pushed back on the heels of her palms to survey Erik, shivering still, eyes glossy in deep arousal, breathing in long gusts that rustled the filmy ruffle of gauze he fingered at her thigh, coming unattached from the exertion of the night. He was a portrait of that which he had always desired and never dared to claim; it showed endearingly even in the troubled bend of his neck. "It's in my mind where the true distortion lies," he finished.

"My fault has been till now in not revealing enough, and yours in revealing too much. I'll tell you now, the Christine Daae of your dreams is that, a dream. I am made of flesh and bone and with my devotion comes much hassle."

"You're worth every pain."

"As my teacher you say this?"

"And as a man discovering love."

"It's all I've ever wanted to give you, Erik."

Christine relieved her teacher's building embarrassment from being trapped under such a frank gaze; gracelessly propelling herself from her hands to rest flush against his fluid torso, wrapping his arms around her and her arms around his neck. Their foreheads rested, hers slightly less than, nuzzling the darkened half of his complexion with a downward progression.

"And it's all I ask of you."

His whimpering mouth reveled in her voice and begged incoherently, finally resolving into a line of music.

"Say you'll share with me, my love, my nighttime..." she brought her fingers to card through his hair, a weak assent to being carried away by his lyrics.

"Let me lead you from the world of light..." Christine kicked off her slippers, climbed into his lap and whispered to the shell of his ear, frantic then suddenly languid, passionate, wishing to stretch out her seduction.

"No more talk of daytime, let go your memories...I'm here, beside you, longing to ask you..." Christine paused to run a finger down Erik's face, grinning so he could feel it against his angular jaw. "How long must we two wait to become one?'" A dying candle audibly spattered the floor as Erik gave Christine his answer.

~~~


	4. Spaces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps not suited for work, depending on where you work. I hope you work someplace nice.  
> Anyways, something interrupts Raoul from his brooding!  
> And of course, Erik and Christine come together.

Raoul frowned at the masterful designs worked into Populaire's ceiling, etched ivory and gold cherubs with expressions bearing peaceful compassion. How could beauty so pure survive at the apex of such a scandal? Christine spirited away from her dorm, rumors of a hidden ghost passed around every dark periphery in Paris, preying on the young and innocent... Yet what of that reverberated back?

  
His gaze fell downward to rest on svelte little Miss Giry. Her chaste, twinkling smile greeted him in time to the twirl of sapphire ballet costumes, her face just one among the giggling, tittering ensemble. And yet, he saw through to the sweetness underneath.

  
Margaret feverishly prayed with mute moving lips that the new Patron was not then noting her off-kilter spin, the lackluster distracted dancing that put a stormy look of reproach into her mother's eyes. Even then there were more than two gazes trained upon Meg; when the wealthy Vicomte watched she felt as though a crowd attended her. It came time for her minute solo of seduction, and it gave Meg ample opportunity to meet her Vicomte's stare in return, eyes blue and round, struck with crystallized emotion.

  
The expression of tender regard she had not hoped to expect from any man.

  
Meg set her jaw against the pounding orchestral pulse, striving to play the scene shyly, with a virginal flourish, echoing the rhythm inside her afresh, as she had in the dorms the night of her christening performance, many years past. Miss Giry interpreted such honey into her steps, when the maestro shouted himself hoarse for fire; she soon learned to put that side of herself away onstage, and it became a rare sight. Especially to passionate Christine.

  
The secret Raoul felt the little dancer shared with him sent powerful chills down his spine. Perhaps there was more to the Opera than particularly aggressive descents into darkness, than horse-haired maid girls in fancy chemises? He stepped closer, nodding an enthusiastic approval to the ballet Madame in his rush across stage left, coming to stand nearer the troupe.

As Meg retreated back from her spotlight Raoul raised his applause far above the din of the orchestra, echoing over distant angels, casting a gleam downward off the chandelier overhead. In the candlelight Miss Giry looked to be an angel herself, flushed and adored. "Bravo!" he hastened, and chased her solitary down the corridor.

~~~

Erik paused for a moment, giving Christine his full attention, before he spoke.

  
"I abandon my defenses to you, as if you were the true better part of me." The fearful apprehension in his tone sent Christine stinging anew.

"Touch me, then, Erik, and trust me for it."

He felt a powerful pull to her pleading voice, even as his hands shook where he felt underneath them the wealth of Christine's eagerness. What if she drew away in seeing the mess of scars covering him, marked all over by inferiority as openly as his face matched to hers?

Erik hesitated, and Christine gently rested his hovering hand at the vee of her bodice, raking it in a sweep to her bare chest, where Christine's heart hammered audibly.

"I am worse yet, Christine, it will turn your love to disgust when you see me...whole." Erik's sigh filled the catacombs, his fingers limp where she caught them to her.

"You think yourself...a repulsive carcass?" He recognized the words of Madame Giry's assistant from many years past, the first anyone spoke freely of him in Christine's presence. He remembered the shocked horror upon her face, so serene in his murmurs just moments before. Erik winced.

"Yes."

"Then, this must be mine, the chance to change your mind. Will you let me try, please, Angel?"

"Yes."

Christine Daae grinned.

~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Advice is nice but kudos are quicker!  
> That didn't rhyme. I'll go back to my Music Theory homework now.


End file.
